Quotes About Introspection

I find there is a quality to being alone that is incredibly precious. Life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid, fuller than before.

One writes not to be read but to breathe...one writes to think, to pray, to analyze. One writes to clear one's mind, to dissipate one's fears, to face one's doubts, to look at one's mistakes--in order to retrieve them. One writes to capture and crystallize one's joy, but also to disperse one's gloom. Like prayer--you go to it in sorrow more than joy, for help, a road back to 'grace'.

I myself am opaque, for some reason. Their eyes cannot see me. Yes, that's it: The world is autistic with respect to me.

Which all goes to show that it is hard to hide how you feel, when mirrors are out there everywhere, just waiting to pounce.

The men who cannot laugh at themselves frighten me even more than those who laugh at everything.

Can one be both barbarian of the soul and sophisticated of the mind?

Before you pity yourself, take a great deal closer look at others, and then decide with who you would or could change places and what sacrifice of your nature you would be prepared to make in order to do so.

I have this theory that actually, after an absence you discover in that first glimpse what you really think and feel about another person. You know things you couldn't know before.

I have this theory actually, that after an absence you discover in that first glimpse what you really think and feel about another person. You know things you couldn't know before

I have an idea for a story. I keep the idea in a special place in my brain and I pull it out every once in a while to examine it, expand it, let it breathe.

Those who are reserved by nature, and who rarely make friends quickly, or lightly, have a natural reluctance to say good-by, if only because new relationships will not quickly, or lightly, replace the ones that are left behind.

A woman like that is not a woman, quite.I have been her kind.

Leaving the page of the book carelessly open,something unsaid, the phone off the hookand the love, whatever it was, an infection.

I feel unspeakably lonely. And I feel - drained. It is a blank state of mind and soul I cannot describe to you as I think it would not make any difference. Also it is a very private feeling I have - that of melting into a perpetual nervous breakdown. I am often questioning myself what I further want to do, who I further wish to be; which parts of me, exactly, are still functioning properly. No answers, darling. At all.

I am crazy as hell, but I know it. And knowing it is a kind of sanity that makes the sickness worse.

Meanwhile in my head, I'm undergoing open-heart surgery.

Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself, Counting this row and that row of moccasins Waiting on the silent shelf.

And I. I too. Quite collected at cocktail parties, meanwhile in my head I'm undergoing open-heart surgery.

Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It's as though I could fly.

If you have endured a great despair, then, you did it alone.

How are you? How is your wonderful bathroom? How are the books you read and the things you think? Your dogs and their lives? The weather? Your feelings?

I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year's cupful and downward into a decade's quart and downward into a lifetime's ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman's float.

This November there seems to be nothing to say.

Maybe I am becoming a hermit, opening the door for only a few special animals? Maybe my skull is too crowded and it has no opening through which to feed it soup?